1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a method and apparatus for dynamically collecting and distributing relevant timely maritime data to a vessel based upon its actual location and/or expected location.
2. Description of Related Art
Maritime vessels, including commercial, research, governmental, and recreational vessels, require accurate and readily available information while at-sea or in-port. The Internet is replete with information that would be conducive to the safe, secure and economical operation of a vessel, critical to the success of the vessel's voyages and the survival of the crew. Such information may include, but is not limited to, weather data, accident data, health crises data, piracy data, terrorism data, open warfare data, disease data, emergency re-routing data, political unrest data, and port contact information data, to name a few. It would be desirable to make this information directly and readily available to a vessel in terms of its actual location at the time the information is needed. Currently, however, there are obstacles that prevent the efficient implementation of this objective.
The above-identified types of information are usually stored in Internet accessible disparate databases having proprietary data structures. Traditionally, an on-shore support team assigned to the vessel receives a request for information from the vessel. The vessel is required to transmit its location, so that the on-shore support team can properly query the appropriate databases and provide information relevant to the vessel's location. Due to the proprietary nature of each of the databases, the on-shore support team is required to format database queries according to the type of database from which any of the above-identified types of information is sought. The resultant data must then be clearly and concisely communicated to the vessel. Unfortunately, this process introduces a significant amount of latency from the moment the request for information is transmitted by the vessel until the fulfillment of that request by the on-shore support team.
In common practice, the world's commercial vessels do not carry the specialized communications gear that would allow them direct access to any such digital information archived on the Internet. Even if a ship could achieve a secure and reliable connection to the Internet at sea, the current cost of satellite communications would make it prohibitively expensive to search such archives and retrieve any findings. This is especially true if the database returns an exorbitant amount of data, thereby consuming a great deal of communications bandwidth and/or communications time. Additionally, many of the databases that contain the information required to respond to a request are slow-opening. For example, a database that provides a user with information about facilities and services available in some 5,000 ports would take the user almost 30 minutes to open and access the information stored in an owning agency's deeply archived, unimproved database when employing the most commonly used 57.6 kbps modem. Such a delay is unacceptable to ships at sea facing real-time emergencies.
Heretofore, there is no system for efficiently collecting relevant maritime data upon the request of a vessel and then distributing the data to the vessel. It is, therefore, desirable to overcome the above problem and others by providing a system where a service provider maintains a dynamic link to several databases and responds to a request from a vessel by transmitting current maritime data to the vessel while consuming a minimal amount of bandwidth and incurring a reduced amount of latency in the transmission of the data. Furthermore, it is desirable for the maritime data to be transmitted to the vessel in response to the vessel indicating its current location or expected location after a set period of time. It is also desirable to allow the vessel to make general and/or specific maritime data requests.
Recent maritime law established that each ship-owning or ship-leasing company appoint a company security officer (CSO) who will have under their command ship security officers (SSOs) for each ship in the company fleet. In order to improve the CSO's span of control over their far-flung SSOs, powerful tools are required, which, until development of the present invention, have been unavailable, even to the United States Navy and Coast Guard. In the last decade the extent and nature of piracy radically changed. Just five years ago the most common reported act of piracy or robbery was theft of a rope. The sudden introduction of heavy weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars, combined with new connections among various criminal organizations, and sheer brutality have deepened the threat of piracy to world's seaborne commerce. As an example, the world's most competent pirates sit in the Straits of Malacca, astride shipping channels through which one-half of the world's goods and one-third of its oil pass. Globally, piracy is estimated to now cost some $18 billion US dollars a year. Known terrorist organizations are now considering enlisting pirates for their naval operations.
Pirates have become very clever at probing the merchant fleet for weaknesses, whether concentrating their attacks at shipping choke points, learning when crew attentiveness is at its lowest, or singling out certain types of low-freeboard ships for attack. In response, the ship masters and security officers must be equipped with a variety of ways to understand and counter the tactics of pirates. This is accomplished by first identifying the ruses used, common boarding points, port-by-port analyses of modus operandi, pirate competence, and ship type criminology.
In sharp contrast to the burgeoning skill sets of the pirates, the information available to the commercial fleet consists primarily of electronically distributed piracy alerts. Though brief recitations, treasure troves of valuable information can to be found, but only through intense analysis of the data. For example, piracy alerts coming from over thirty sources are scattered, sometimes inaccurate and in dire need of parsing.
Still other desirable features of the invention will become apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art upon reading and understanding the following detailed description.